Naija Strikes Back!

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted an update, I've been pretty busy over the past few days, and I've come to know first hand what people mean here when they say "Body no be stone" All the traveling around in rickety buses and on the back of Okada (I may have mentioned that they are somewhat suspect motor bikes and unfortunately slightly less than safe) has really tired me out so I'm not doing anything more until monday at the earliest.

Before I left Mr. Onifade's house in Osogbo the last time, I asked him if he knows any Alfas that I could interview. Alfas are Muslim leaders/scholars/diviners all rolled into one who play a role very similar to that of the Babalawo, and even share the same herbal tradition nad practices that the Babalawos have. I anted to interview one or two of them to see what they were all about and get a Muslim perspective on Ifa. Mr Onifade said he knew of one guy who would be great for that and would get me in touch with him, so the next day Dele called me and said if I came to Osogbo again by 2 we could go see the guy.

Naturally I thought he was in Osogbo too, but when I got there I found out he lives about an hours drive away in a town called Ogbagba, and Mr. Onifade was just going to drive us there. The dude is too much. He also picked up another one of their Babalawo friends, and I kpet thinking that if you told me a few months ago that I would be driving to talk to a Muslim diviner in a car with 3 Babalawos I probably would've laughed at you, but that's what was going on.

The Alfa that we were going to see (the Babalawos came too because I htink they were just as interested as I was) is named Al-Haji Hamad Akurede, and everythign about him is big, his voice, his build, and even the welcome he gave us. He and everyone else were impressed that I knew Arabic, and had a good laugh when I started reading all the things he had on his wall, and could transliterate everyones' names into Arabic.

To cut a long story short, through a combination of broken pidgin English, Yoruba, and a bit of Arabic, Mr. Akurede basically told me that Ifa and Islam (Alfas in particular) are very close because the religion of Islam came from a society of traditional religion in which people worhsipped the orishas. This is fairly accurate since the Arabs were practising something not unlike what the olorishas (devotees of the orishas) do now and have been doing for hundreds/thousands of years.

What was even more interesting was that he said this man, Setiyu, whom most of the Babalawos I have interviewed have mentioned, practiced Ifa at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, and he actually was called to consult Ifa when the Meccans were chasing him and he hid in a cave in the mountains. According to Mr. Akurede, and Mr. Onifade agreed, Setiyu used Ifa to tell where he was, and told the Meccans to go find him in that cave, but as you may know, the cave was sealed by a spiderweb and a birds nest after the Prophet Muhammad and Abu Bakr, his companion, went inside it. This made the Meccans think Setiyu was lying or in cahoots with Muhammad so they killed him and smashed his divining tools. Later they realized that he was right, and went back to find his diving chain (called an opele in Yorubaland) and they found that of the original 16 cowrie-shells or nuts, only 8 were left, and the other 8 were said to have been dispersed in the bush and became the medicines and herbs that Babalawos now have to go out and pick ot heal people. While this may not be completely historically accurate (I'm not sure if Ifa was around then, much less in Saudi Arabia) it's certainly interesting nonetheless. I'm trying to look up any account of this Setiyu guy on the internet since Mr. Akurede couldn't remember where it was in the Quran.

The other interesting thing he taught me was about Islamic Sand divination. Before coming I had done some researh about how similar I thought they were, even though lots of scholars disagree. I just asked about divination in general, and Al-Haji basically told me that he prints sand to do Ifa. He said that he does it in a different way from Babalawos, but that they were like two different languages saying the same thing. They have different forms, but say the same thing. He said the same is also true of religion, that all real religions recognize one God, like the Muslims say, and that they all have intermediaries, like Orunmila or Jesus, that help them get to God. Anyway, he basically taught me how to do Islamic Sand divination (along with a few other methods of divination), and it was more or less exactly what I had read about. The reason it was so important was because the end result of the whole process is a column of 4 symbols, either one short vertical line or two that looks like this:

II I
I or II etc.
I I
II I

These signs are what are called Odu in Ifa and carry the message that the Babalawos give their clients. They're exactly the same. Al-Haji and the Babalawos had fun coming up with different ones, and the Babalawos would say the name in Yoruba, and Al-Haji would tell me, "see they're the same!" Even though some disagree, I think there has to be something there, because Muslim diviners print these symbols on sand to get divinatory messages, and Babalawos do exactly the same thing. I also asked another Alfa about this yesterday (after he offered to marry me to his daughter) and he told me that it was indeed Ifa, and that Muslims probably shouldn't be doing that, even though they can go to the Babalawos for help. The whole thing was very interesting...

I had actually planned to see this other Alfa on Wednesday, but the students at Obafemi Awolowo decided to have a strike, for a reason I still do not fully understand. These things happen all the time at least in West African Universities when there are budget cuts and that sort of thing. So they students shut down lectures and wouldn't let buses in the campus, and being myself I just decided that I would take the extra hour and just walk out to the University gate. Unfortuantely there weren't many people as resolved as I was, so by the time I got to the bus to Osogbo, there was only 1 other person in it, and 20 minutes later there were only 2 other people in it. Since these buses don't leave until they're full, I could tell I wasn't going to get to Osogbo anytime soon, so I called Dele and told him that we'd have to postpone for the next day. This is why things often just don't work in Nigeria...

Anyway I was able to meet this Alfa, who told me his grandfather or great-grandfather was a Babalawo, and another Babalawo yesterday. The meeting with the Babalawo mainly taught me that I don't want to interview any more Babalawos in Osogbo. Not that they aren't nice, they're just all telling me more or less the same thing at this point, and I don't have the time or energy to do it all over again. This was tough to explain to Dele because he keeps giving me the names of more Babalawos that he knows in Osogbo and Ilobu, which is almost the same thing, saying that they knoew what they're talking about and that they'll tell me the truth. I just told him that even if other people don't know what they're saying, I want to hear what they have to say and see why they think that. It was kinda awkward because we kept running into his friends, and I think most of them heard that there's a white kid running around giving Babalawos money and wine, what the call alcohol, if they'll talk to him for an hour, so they're all pretty willing to talk to me.

Well that's most of the news I have for now. I'm going to try to get my last 5 or 6 interviews transcribed and then I want to try to interview a few Babalawos in Ife itself, including the Awise I first met since he had the most interesting thigns to say, and then maybe I'll get to go back to Ibadan and or Lagos to hang out with Uncle Seun and Aunty Bimbo, and maybe even a Babalawo or two.

Still not married or initiated,
~Deji

PS The second Alfa that I met also reference one Surah of the Quran (Surat-al Kafirun) to explain that Muslims shouldn't be attacking Ifa worshippers or anyone else like that since it reads:

Say: O unbelievers!
I do not serve that which you serve
Nor do you serve Him Whom I serve:
Nor am I going to serve that which you serve,
Nor are you going to serve Him Whom I serve:
You shall have your religion and I shall have my religion.
Or alternatively:
To you be your Way, and to me mine.


I'd never heard that interpretation before, and it was pretty cool that he read it out to me in Arabic and I followed what it said!